Parazoid.net

Sunday called for a format of the work laptop to accommodate Fedora 10. I am quite pleased that gnome-rdp is now included, but I miss suspending.

*sad panda face*

I was listening to my iPod at work today when Sevendust’s cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” came on which started a good run of Wikipedia crawling….which resulted in Sad Kermit. While I am a Muppet fan, I thoroughly enjoy this parody. Check it out when you get a chance, you can see the video here.

Side question, what covers of “Hurt” do you like? I heard Johnny Cash’s version before all versions of the song and still love it, but many bands have covered it (Wikipedia has a good list here). So far I’ve only heard the versions by NIN, Johnny Cash, Sevendust and now Sad Kermit, but need to hear more. I wonder if Cake will ever cover it…

I’m sitting around at a conference, and just to share with you some of the pain I feel I figured I would post this:

PING google.com (72.14.207.99) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from eh-in-f99.google.com (72.14.207.99): icmp_seq=1 ttl=241 time=2190 ms
64 bytes from eh-in-f99.google.com (72.14.207.99): icmp_seq=2 ttl=241 time=1470 ms
64 bytes from eh-in-f99.google.com (72.14.207.99): icmp_seq=3 ttl=241 time=1467 ms
64 bytes from eh-in-f99.google.com (72.14.207.99): icmp_seq=4 ttl=241 time=1195 ms
64 bytes from eh-in-f99.google.com (72.14.207.99): icmp_seq=5 ttl=241 time=985 ms

— google.com ping statistics —
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 3999ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 985.984/1462.167/2190.931/407.187 ms, pipe 3

Seeing as how today is PI day I found this particulary good, but requires you to drop the last ‘e.’

I prefer pie

I’m stuck in an all day conference call of a sick person telling us what we already know, so I might as well get around to posting about the trip I just got back from. All around it was a great trip. I enjoyed Tempe but the workshop itself was more management than technical so that was a bummer but I made some good contacts and had plenty of side conversations. Some points though:

• Flights: I don’t mind flying, but being stuck three people in when you want to go to the bathroom and you have incredible heartburn for 5+ hours is not fun. However while flying out we were chasing the sun as it was setting which was amazing. I had the window on the south facing side so I got to see some incredible gradients and such. And if anyone ever has to pick up baggage in the Phoenix airport, I feel for you.
• Mr. Pibb: There’s a Coca-Cola bottling facility in Tempe so most of the place offer Coke products, including Mr. Pibb!! Something I’m not used to seeing since I’m in the northeast, but it’s amazing.
• Weather: The first day out, the weather was phenomenal, it was like a perfect Spring day. Thursday and Friday however there was some rain or just the feeling of pending rain but not too bad. However, we were sitting outside at a Happy Hour talking about CAS Thursday night, and got hailed on thrice.
• The Big Bang: Thursday night I went out looking for a bar. Being only three blocks away from ASU this was not a difficult task, but which bar to go to first. We walked into a basement bar called “The Big Bang” which advertises itself as a dueling piano bar. Holy Cow! If you are a fan of live music and find yourself in Tempe go to The Big Bang. We had an amazing time. The “I’m only going out for 1 drink” night turned into a night in which we had t o leave at 2:00 because Tempe closes down at 2:00.

So it was a good trip. I was completely exhausted Saturday night when I got back to Albany, but with my love of live music I went straight to Mahoney’s to see Replica. Just a couple more days of not working on projects then I fly down to Orlando for another conference.